Rain on Mars? Four billion years ago, lake deposits formed inside impact craters

About four billion years ago, there were lakes on Mars which may have been fed by short-lived rivers that were, in turn, fed by precipitation. These lakes filled craters that were formed by the impact of meteorites. Water accumulated in places where rivers broke through the crater rims. Deltas were formed at the mouths of the rivers, similar to how they are formed where rivers flow into lakes or seas on Earth. These are the findings of an international team of researchers led by Ernst Hauber of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR), who analysed the latest image data of the Martian surface. They discovered delta deposits in these images, relatively unaffected by erosion, inside the craters.

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